A Bullet In the Brain

A Critique of the Critical CharacterA Bullet in the Brain, by Tobias Wolff, is a short story published in 1995. The story’s main protagonist Anders, is a book critic by profession but shows that he is also critic of the world around him. Anders happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time in this story and finds himself in the middle of a robbery at his local bank. He is ultimately shot in the head by a robber, due to his smug attitude. The story goes on to explore major events in his life, that oddly do not manifest as memories but one seemingly insignificant moment invades his last, dying thoughts. Anders character is an unlikeable fellow, and his disposition makes it difficult for the reader to muster any compassion for him, or to feel concerned about what this dying man’s thoughts might be.

Tobias Wolff’s character, Anders, is so arrogant that it makes him difficult to relate to. The first impression given by Anders is that he is capable of being driven to a “murderous” temper for simply being exposed to the conversation of two women in line in front of him, at the bank for a short period of time. He is also capable of feeling hatred towards a bank teller for closing her station, hatred that he turns on to the woman in front of him for attempting to engage in small talk about their situation. Of course, there will be some readers that will share Anders’ critical attitude but it seems likely that most would be turned off by his contempt for running an every day errand. Most rationale people are probably not driven to hateful thoughts from being subjected to small talk around them. Anders seems to be seeking reasons in life to give him the opportunity to be rude.

The robbers arrive and the reader gets real insight to just how snobbish and foolish Anders is. Not only does he seem more concerned with offending the robbers by making smart aleck remarks about their choice of words, he seems totally unconcerned about potentially negatively affecting the innocent people that surround him. One customer pleads with Anders to stop but he continues to purposefully antagonize criminal men, with loaded guns. Anders, gets a kick out of Tobias Wolff’s convenient choice of words that he applies to the dialog of the robbers. Cliché terms such as, ‘dead meat’ and ‘capiche?’ are cringe-worthy bad-guy catch phrases. Anders responds sarcastically and taunts the men in what seems to be a power struggle. Wit verses handguns. He may have had the same opportunity to respond sarcastically to just ‘dead’ or ‘you got it?’ Perhaps it was not totally necessary to fit the robbers into Anders’ narrative to drive his reactions, but the robbers might have come off more believable if Anders had somehow fit into theirs.

When Anders shows his sarcastic demeanor so assertively he ends up with a gun under his chin, which he has brought on himself, he still does not let up. While he has a gun to his chin he takes time to notice a painting on the ceiling that he finds distasteful and laughs out loud about it. At this point in the story the reader may feel little sympathy for his circumstance and may agree that in some way he has brought this situation on himself. The gun is fired at Anders’ head and while the bullet is traveling through his brain the reader is initially taken on a journey through events in Anders’ life that he does not remember. Although the events seem to be, for the most part, significant, Anders does not remember them. Instead, he remembers an encounter he experienced as a young boy playing baseball with friends. A seemingly insignificant moment when another child uses improper English is this man’s last dying thought and memory. Should one care what Anders remembers or doesn’t remember? He is a pompous jerk.

After the description of memories, that give the reader a glimpse into Anders’ world, that did not come to him as the bullet goes through his brain...

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

...Bullet in the Brain" is deceptively obvious. Wolff makes choices that are immediately striking as unusual and key, that leap out from the page, so to speak, waving and shouting, "Look at me! Analyze me to gain insight into the story!" He shoots his character in the head halfway into the story, suspends the fatal bullet in the character's brain in "brain time" so that he can recount various snapshots of his life, and introduces these snapshots not with the phrase "he remembered" but rather with "he didn't remember." These choices are obviously significant. But their obviousness as points on which analysis should focus belies the magnitude of the themes Wolff addresses through them and the subtlety with which he addresses them. In this seven-page short story about a man getting shot in a bank, Wolff engages with themes no less weighty than those of language and literature.
Anders goes to the bank, witnesses its getting held up, laughs in a gun-wielding bank robber's face, and gets a bullet in the brain for his amusement. What is striking here? Anders's brazenness, foolhardiness, and obnoxiousness, certainly, and we infer from clues the narrator provides that these are informed by his weariness and bitterness toward life. Sure. But what is subtle here? It isn't subtle that Anders's amusement is elicited by the robbers' trite and derivative speech; the story wears this on its...

...Bullet in the Brain by Tobias Wolff
I once heard that if you get executed with a guillotine you feel, see and hear when your head hits the ground. I don’t know if it’s true. A friend of mine told me that he once killed a hen. He held it tightly to the woodblock, he was intended use, and when he brutally separated its head from its body he led go of the hen and it ran headless around for several seconds. I know that’s true. I read that when you get shot in the head and the bullet smash into your brain, destroying everything which makes your mind and body work, the split-second that passes before you die give you the time to remember massive amounts of memories. If that’s true I hope my memories will be different than Anders’.
“Bullet in the brain” is a small story written by Tobias Wolff. It starts in “in medias res” which is characteristic for a short story. It contains very few characters; actually it acts around the main character Anders in the entire story except for the flashbacks where we get introduced to Anders past, which is also typical for the genre.
Anders has similar with several others a way of focusing on the negative around him. Your first sight of this is on p. 1“Anders couldn’t get to the bank until just before it closed, so of course the line was endless…” (p.1 l.1). In stead of being glad that he made it to the bank before it closed he focus on the line. This...

...Bullet in the Brain
The main character in Bullet in the Brain is a middle-aged book critic, who is especially “known for the weary elegant savagery with which he dispatched almost everything he reviewed” (1, L 5). You might even call him a grumpy old man, because basically that is what he is – but more about that subject later on.
The story takes off when Anders enters the bank just before it closes, and therefore the line is endlessly long, which puts him in a bad temper. “He was never in the best of tempers anyways, Anders”(1, L 4), but it certainly does not help when the two women in front of him start complaining about one the bank tellers leaving her position. Anders “conceive his towering hatred of the teller” (1, L 15), and instead he turns his frustrations towards the “cry-baby” in front of him and sarcastically utter “Tragic, really. If they’re not chopping off the wrong leg, or bombing your ancestral village, they’re closing their positions” (1, L 17-19). Obviously Anders is not the most likable person ever, and even though it is hard for ordinary people to get along with him, it is even harder for bank robbers to do so, which becomes crystal clear when two of these lowlifes suddenly make an appearance in the bank. Usually bank robbery is not exactly a desirable scenario to be present at, but nonetheless seems strangely amused by the situation, especially when one of the bank robbers says “one of you...

...﻿ Orlando Godinez
Rhetorical Analyses Essay
In “Bullet in the Brain” (1995), Tobias Woolf conveys the story of a man named Anders, a book critic, who experiences one final memory after being shot in the head by bank robbers. The story begins with Anders entering a Bank in the closing hours and criticising the long lines and bad service. Then, two bank robbers hold up the bank and end up shooting Anders in the head for his arrogant behavior. Woolf then goes on to explain his last memory as he is dying from his wounds. The bank robbers dialogue is important. The different ways that Wolff depicts the Robber’s dialogue greatly influences the tone of the story.
Wolff’s way of using peculiar responses from the bank robbers is almost like a death trap for the critical Anders. He dares to taunt the robbers and makes ironic remarks on their usage of words. “Hey! Bright boy! Did I tell you to talk.. Did you hear that. Bright boy. Right out of the killers”(Anders202). Anders finds their words distinctive enough that he needs to make a comment about it. By ignoring what the robbers do and say he makes the situation worse as the robbers start to lose their head because of him. A nervous robber is much more dangerous than a calmed one and Anders would consider this but he does not. He doesn’t realize that he just put the
people in danger as well as himself, even when he was asked to be quiet by a woman next to...

...Sagy Sheein
Pro.Crawford
“Bullet in the Brain”
“Bullet in the Brain” is a short story written by Tobias Wolff. The story is about a book critic named Anders, while waiting in a long line at the bank he is the victim of an armed robbery and gets shot and killed. The story is divided in to two parts, and this division allows the reader to see a contrast between two parts of main character’s personality.
I want to argue in this essay that the combination of Anders love of words and negative past experiences are what led to his death, and demonstrate the contrast of Anders wisdom when he was younger ,and innocence when he was older, as a consequence of that combination.
In the first part of the story when Anders is waiting in line, he’s witness to an armed robbery and he is sarcastic and cynical until he got shot in the head. In the second part the bullet inside Anders brain slows down time to let the reader witness the negative past experience that made him such a cynical sarcastic and childish person that he was when he got shot.
I will start from the second part of the plot when he got shot. In this part of the story we see more sides to Anders character. We have a short summary of Anders past experience in life that made him so cynical and sarcastic like he is to the point he got shot. The highlight of the second part is that the writer made a list of memories that Anders would not...

...Bullet in the Brain is a short story about a sarcastic book critic, who allows his criticism to extend to his everyday life and soon learns why that is not a good idea.
Anders is known for "the weary elegant savagery with which he dispatched almost everything he reviewed." He is portrayed as especially unsympathetic. He is standing in line at a bank and gets stuck behind two women whose loud stupid conversations put him in an angry mood. He engages in sarcastic, belittling repartee with the women when a robbery occurs. Two men wearing black ski masks are standing on the side of the door. He can not resist making an acid comment about the language of the robber when one of the robbers threatens the teller that she'll be dead meat if she turns on the alarm. The woman tells him to be quiet, but he does not seem to recognise the reality of the dangerous situation. When one of the robbers says "Then Shut your Trap, "Anders recognises the clichés found in Hemmingway's crime fiction, the Killers. He attracts the attention of the robber, who pokes the weapon into his guts. He stares at the ceiling and finds the painting ugly and amusing. The robber thinks that Anders is making fun of him and says, "Fuck with me again, you're history. Capriche?" He laughs at the inauthentic language and says, "Capiche- oh, God, capiche". He seems to view the event as an uninvolved critic and can not stop reviewing - even when his life depends on it.
The bank...

...In the story “Bullet in the Brain”, we read about Anders. He has a choice between life and death but because of his carnality, it causes him his life. As a bank is being robbed, he acts out very disturbingly, which causes one of the bank robbers to shoot him in the brain. We read about the journey in his brain, which sheds light on his past and most of all his family. Anders left behind a daughter and wife, but he does not remember the love he once had for the both of them. I believe he loved his wife but may have grown a bit of anger towards her since he described her as being “predictable”. He loved his daughter and when she was younger, he could probably see some of himself in her. Which may have caused him to be a little scared and withdrawn from her. He once had a relationship with his family but through all his anger and self-hatred, he forgot about them or even distances himself from them. He didn’t really care about anyone but himself, which caused him to be angry, sarcastic and ultimately forget what his family meant to him. He truly lacked the importance of what a family was
In the story “Viewfinder”, the narrator tells us about a photographer he meets with no hands who take pictures of homes for a living. He finds that the man with no hands is very talented and they begin to talk and open up to one another. The narrator is very lonely, because his family left him all alone. He has to come to terms that...

...﻿Lezly Ferguson
In the article “Why Bother” by Michael Pollan, the author states that despite the fact our planet is at great risk due to continuous carbon emissions, “we”(the people) have done nothing to stop it. It is this passive attitude, Pollan argues, that inhibits us from helping our planet. Michael Pollen quotes Wendell Berry in his essay saying that “the deep standing problem behind all the other problems of industrial civilization is specialization” (Pollan, 91). Indeed, it is this “specialization” that causes humans to believe that we only have one role in society, and that we cannot expand outside this world to which we are familiar. In other words, most people do not wan the article “Why Bother” by Michael Pollan, the author states that despite the fact our planet is at great risk due to continuous carbon emissions, “we”(the people) have done nothing to stop it. It is this passive attitude, Pollan argues, that inhibits us from helping our planet. Michael Pollen quotes Wendell Berry in his essay saying that “the deep standing problem behind all the other problems of industrial civilization is specialization” (Pollan, 91). Indeed, it is this “specialization” that causes humans to believe that we only have one role in society, and that we cannot expand outside this world to which we are familiar. In other words, most people do not waste their time with environmental issues such as the one Pollan is discussing because they believe it is not their job...